McIntosh County has spent almost half a million dollars defending its 2023 rezoning of Hogg Hummock, a small neighborhood on Sapelo Island that’s traditionally been home to a Gullah Geechee community.
Through open records requests, The Current GA gathered attorneys’ invoices and county purchase order summaries from October 2023 through August 2025. The payments, connected to Sapelo-rezoning-related lawsuits, add up to more than $491,000 and continue to accumulate in a county where the 2026 fiscal year budget comes in at about $21 million.
The county commission passed the rezoning in September 2023, in a tumultuous meeting packed with citizens opposed to the changes, which were designed to allow larger houses to be built in the enclave thus increasing the rural county’s tax base. Longtime residents, many of them descendants of people enslaved on Georgia’s sea islands, feared the resulting gentrification and higher property taxes would drive them out of their homes and sweep in wealthy developers.
In litigation that is ongoing, the residents sued the county claiming the zoning amendment violates state law and their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection.
Through August, county taxpayers have paid Cumming-based Jarrard & Davis $254,604 in this case, Grovner et al. v. McIntosh.
The spending could be slowing, however. Earlier this week Senior Judge F. Gates Peed issued a 30-day stay requested jointly by both parties to allow them to negotiate a settlement.
“The parties in our case are discussing settlement, and our case has been stayed, and we’re going to give the court an update in 30 days about where we are,” said Senior Attorney Miriam Gutman of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is representing the Sapelo residents.
Preliminary talks have touched only on logistics, Attorney Ken Jarrard, who represents the county, told The Current GA.
“The County welcomes the opportunity to sit down with all parties and work in good faith toward solutions,” Jarrard wrote in an email.
Paying for both sides
In a separate attempt to undo the rezoning, community groups in the summer of 2024 successfully filed a petition in probate court to force a countywide vote to repeal the zoning change. Early voting was already underway last year ahead of the scheduled Oct. 1 referendum when a Superior Court judge granted the county’s request to shut down the special election. But that decision was appealed to the state Supreme Court, which in September ruled to put the referendum back on the ballot. A special election is scheduled for Jan. 20, 2026.
The cost to hold the referendum – previously estimated at $20,000 – was cited as one reason the county shouldn’t be forced to conduct it. But fighting against it in court ultimately cost the county at least $236,681 in legal fees. Most of that money went to Jarrard & Davis. But because the county was suing its own probate judge, Harold Webster, it was required to pay for his legal fees, too. Those fees totaled $54,020 for the services of Attorney Kellye Moore of Perry-based Walker Hulbert Gray & Moore. In October 2024, Moore informed the county that her rate for defending Webster was increasing to $375 an hour.
“I confirmed with attorney Ken Jarrard the hourly rate that McIntosh County is paying him for his representation in this litigation and have adjusted my hourly rate accordingly,” she wrote.
McIntosh has increased its budget for legal fees significantly over the course of the zoning litigation. In fiscal year 2024, before any of this litigation began, the county expected to spend $132,750 in legal costs. The next year it bumped that number up to $230,000. In the current 2026 fiscal year budget, it’s $300,000.
Encouraged by talks
Josiah “Jazz” Watts, a Sapelo descendant and One Hundred Miles Justice Strategist, is encouraged that talks are underway.
“I would hope that they would come to the table in good faith with an understanding of doing the things that can protect the culture, the heritage of the community,” Watts said. “This community has brought so much to not only McIntosh County and the state of Georgia, but I also see people from all over the world come to visit the island. If we can all come to the table with that understanding, then everybody wins.”
Watts sounds wistful talking about how the Hogg Hummock community, which suffered the loss of seven Gullah-Geechee festivalgoers when a ferry dock collapsed last year, could have benefitted from the tax dollars that instead went to the zoning fight.
“This is nothing that we asked for,” Watts said. “This is something that we responded to that still is threatening our way of life. So I’m glad that somebody is finally saying, ‘You know, maybe we do need to sit down and have a discussion and see if there’s a possibility of working this out.’”
Parties from both the referendum litigation and the ongoing zoning litigation will be involved in the settlement talks.
It’s unclear how the upcoming referendum will be affected if a settlement is reached before Jan. 20, 2026, when voters again go to the polls.
Attorney Dana Braun, of Savannah-based Ellis Painter, which represented Sapelo residents in the state Supreme Court case, said if the parties can reach an agreement that obviates the need for a referendum they’ll still have to determine if there’s a legal way for the referendum not to go forward.
It’s uncharted territory, especially given how new the use of the referendum process is, the attorneys noted.
“I think there’s a lot of complexity here, and I’m hoping – I think the parties are hoping – that through settlement negotiations we can resolve it,” Gutman said.
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